Private Remains An Unsung Hero

Soldier Captured With Jessica Lynch Given Silver Star

September 28, 2003|By TOM BOWMAN Special to the Daily Press

FORT CARSON, COLO. — Pfc. Jessica Lynch is the celebrity soldier of the Iraq war. Pfc. Patrick Miller, a member of the same company captured with her in a ferocious firefight, remains one of its unsung heroes.

Lynch, Miller and others in their convoy mistakenly drove into the vipers' nest of Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, early on a March morning and were encircled by Iraqi fighters. In the ensuing swirl of chaos and shouting, wrong turns and unrelenting fire, Lynch's Humvee crashed and she lay unconscious among her dead and dying comrades.

It was Miller, a 23-year-old Army welder from Kansas, who single-handedly took on several Iraqis, manually slamming rounds into his assault rifle and firing as they prepared to lob mortar rounds at Lynch and other soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company.

"He's one of my heroes," said Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, who was wounded and leaning against her truck as Miller dashed past her up a dusty road toward the Iraqi mortar pit. "His actions may have saved my life."

Miller was the sole member of the unit to receive the Silver Star, the military's third highest award for valor. Nearly 130,000 Army troops served in the Iraq war and its aftermath, but only 86 Silver Star medals had been awarded through mid-September, according to the Army Personnel Command. Lynch and other members of the 507th received Bronze Stars, a notch below the Silver Star.

"Shoshana yelled at him, 'Get down, Miller! Get down! You're going to get hit!' said another soldier, Spc. Edgar Hernandez, describing how Miller charged toward the Iraqis. Hernandez recalled hearing automatic fire from Iraqi AK-47s and the single shots of Miller's M-16 rifle.

As a prisoner of war, Miller badgered his interrogators for three weeks, singing an off-key rendition of country singer Toby Keith's anti-terrorist song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." And he fooled them.

The Iraqis pressed him to explain a series of numbers and code words scratched on a piece of paper inside his helmet. Prices for power-steering pumps, he told them. The soldiers tossed the paper into a small campfire, unaware they had destroyed information vital to an enemy: radio frequencies for an invading unit.

"He's a Pfc. in the Army and he exposed himself without hesitation to the enemy to save his comrades," said Col. Heidi V. Brown, who commanded the Army task force in Iraq that included Miller's unit and who wrote his medal citation based on interviews with U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. "It doesn't get more heroic than that."

All the witnesses corroborated the tale of Miller charging toward a mortar pit and shooting at the enemy, said Brown, though no one could agree on a precise number of enemy dead. An Army investigative report said it could have been as many as nine. "Absolutely, he killed some Iraqis," Brown said.

A MYTH IS BORN

The story of Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army supply clerk from West Virginia, began as a piece of faulty information. An intercepted Iraqi radio transmission referred to a blonde American woman who repeatedly fired on her attackers, despite bullet and stab wounds.

The inaccuracy was passed on to reporters, and the myth of a slightly-built clerk who morphed into a fierce warrior quickly circulated. Her legend only grew when Special Operations soldiers stormed a hospital in early April and rescued her. But to this day, according to Army investigators, there is no known evidence that she ever fired her weapon or killed any Iraqis.

Lynch, who left the Army with a medical discharge this summer, never portrayed herself as a hero. When she returned home to West Virginia in July, she thanked those who rescued her and said she regretted that some in her company never made it home.

"Patrick is a brave soldier, risking his life as he did to save others. I am proud of his courage," said Lynch on Friday, in remarks relayed through her spokesman, Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf. The publishing house signed her to a $1 million book deal for her wartime experiences titled "I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story."

The Army transferred Miller last month Texas to this wind-swept military base hard up against the forested mountains of the Rampart Range in central Colorado. In May, he was Grand Marshal at an Armed Forces Day parade in Topeka, Kan., up the interstate from Valley Center, his rural hometown of about 5,000. Several weeks later he threw out the first ball at a Kansas City Royals baseball game.

Gangly and bespectacled, with a loping gait, Miller speaks in a broad Kansas drawl that enlivens his casual grammar and the occasional "dang." His lower lip bulges with an ever-present wad of chewing tobacco.